PlayStation.Blog

PlayStation Mobile: Surge Electrifies PS-Certified Devices Tomorrow

Hello! My name is Jack Lang, Junior Programmer at FuturLab. I’m responsible for the programming on our new game, Surge, and I’m here today to talk briefly about how the PlayStation Mobile SDK has made the process of developing our game for PS Vita really easy!

I started out as a Flash developer because I wanted to make games. This experience, along with some prior knowledge of C#, meant that I was able to use the PSM cross-platform SDK to focus on the game rather than the specifics of each platform it supports.

As you can see from the trailer above, Surge uses nice visual effects, and thanks to PSM I was able to pick and choose between high and low level programming libraries, making it possible to get visual features like the ‘awesomizer’ line style, particles and the attractive color blurring glow effects running efficiently and in a short space of time.

I’d recommend learning the PlayStation Mobile SDK if any readers want to get started making games, so if you have any questions I’ll be happy to answer them; don’t be shy! Surge is out tomorrow for all PlayStation Certified devices, including PS Vita. For more info, check out FuturLab’s website.

Need more information on PlayStation Mobile? Want to know more about supported tablets and phones? Head here.

On a side note, I’m really, really, really, really looking forward to the game you’re teasing on your website right now. If it’s not Velocity 2 there will be rioting in the streets. The streets I say! ;)

For some reason Jack isn’t able to log in to answer your questions. In the meantime, I can help.

@Gorvi – You’ll have to wait and see how much it costs, but we think people will be happy. Also, good to hear it! :)

@Rhymoau – Great to hear you have a soft spot – I’m glad the game is finished now because I was spending way too much time playing it. It’s our most addictive action-puzzler yet. That’s a promise :p It does have trophies, but only in-game trophies that we have created ourselves, not PSN trophies as they’re not supported yet… Soon I hope!

PSP is pretty old now, with technology that has been replaced by newer, faster hardware – fast enough to run Virtual Machines on top of their own operating system.

That’s essentially what PlayStation Mobile is, a Virtual Platform that can be run on fairly high spec devices. The idea being that you can build a game once, and it will work on lots of devices, but those devices need to be powerful enough to run the Virtual Machine, and the PSP, bless it, can’t keep up :)

Please! Online Leaderboards for PSM games and adding them to games that have already been released — that’s the ONLY thing PSM is missing! I really-really-really want to be able to compare my scores with my friends’ and challenge them to a score-off in Super Crate Box!

Looks awesome! Must be some really last minute decision going on with the price if you still can’t say what it is. Do those online leaderboards you mention in the previous comment access your friends list? That’d be awesome. Then the only thing PSM games would need is trophies. Thanks for the info!

Whenever a good looking game is announced as a mini or a psmobile game, of course I wish it was just a PSN game so it will have all of the connectivity and trophies we’re accustomed to. It won’t stop me from picking up the real gems, but I still wish it would just be PSN. Hopefully SCE at least fixes the issues with PSmobile so it’s just as if it was PSN.

Sony needs to do something about this whole PlayStation Minis and PlayStation Mobile crap and have all PlayStation (and Sony) as one, everything is compatible on all PlayStation (and certified) devices and it’s buy once play on all and you get a digital version of your physical purchase. That’s perfection, that’s domination. And of course full PSN integration in everything and PSN being “one” as well, not a seperate PSN for different products which is very stupid and bad.

Since you led off talking about the development platform, I have some questions about your experience.

1. We’ve been using Unity on our very small indie project, and *hate* how much they charge for a gimped product. Originally we were using Ogg encoding, but then that was taken away with a Unity update! What codecs does PSM support by default, and do the libraries allow for alignment of loops with variable bit rates?

2. What is the asset packaging/pipeline like? We looked at converting our project to MonoGame, but the total lack of any kind of asset pipeline made it impossible to work with.

3. Unity (and Android, for that matter) has a 1990s-style forced-inheritance model where our objects had to derive from sealed, concrete classes. This made leveraging object-oriented design principles and unit testing/mocking very difficult, mainly due to the lack of pure interfaces in their class libraries. (We ended up reimplementing those concrete base classes in a MockUnity library, but it was/is quite tedious.) Is PSM any better/different on this front?

onto your game…

who did the music? what codec/bitrate are the assets?

did you write any of your own shaders/maps, or just use the sample ones?

1. We’ve been working with PSM in its beta stage so some things may have changed. At the time there was WAV and mp3 support. WAV looping is seamless and we were using files at a number of bitrates. There was no call for stream looping with mp3 so I couldn’t give you a definite answer on that, but looping is available there too, usually encoder lag is the problem though… One of our other games, Beats Slider is a really great example of what you can do with sound on PSM. All the music for that and Surge has been created in-house

2. The only assets we used were PNGs, the texture facilities allow you to load normal web friendly files and convert to different formats ( ARGB4, 8, 5551, luminance and others ) at runtime rather than needing to encode or mess about with them beforehand. We set up a couple of custom commands within the IDE to get our workflow nice and designer friendly

3. Yes that has irked me about many platforms too, PSM doesn’t have that problem though! You can use the higher level libraries but even they’re not too restrictive. You are free to define data formats for your shaders and your own structs that are send through to the gpu, all totally free of any library classes. The only time you need to use library code is to define your sounds, shaders, textures, and to make to draw calls. The source can be gotten for all the high level libraries as well, so you can mess around all you like

There are shaders in the samples and some inbuilt ones in the high level libraries, but I wrote/modified all the shaders used in Surge to some degree, it’s all done in cg which is compiled depending on the device your game is running on. The colourful background makes use of numerous shaders and render textures. But you can also leave them alone if you don’t need them. You also get access to the depth buffer and other aspects of the rendering pipeline that you don’t get with something like Unity ;)